Audio by title randi_spivak

For the past year Oregon news has been filled with stories of timber-dependent counties on the brink of bankruptcy. Beginning in 1937 these 18 western Oregon counties benefited from federal timber receipts, as they overcut old growth forests on western BLM lands—the so-called "O&C" lands granted to the Oregon and California Railroad in 1866 and taken back by the government in 1916 for violating terms of the land grant. The unsustainable clearcutting of old-growth forests, and the receipts they generated, plummeted in the early 1990s when the threat to salmon, wildlife, clean water and watersheds could no longer be ignored. Congress cushioned the fall by instituting direct federal payments to help transition the counties away from dependence on federal subsidies.